The duo’s relationship dates back 18 months and had already manifested in a number of joint product integrations. Owning Anametrix was the natural next step, according to Ensighten’s founder and CEO, Josh Manion.

Anametrix was founded in 2010 by alums of WebSideStory (a web analytics tool acquired by Omniture in 2007) and employed 30, all of whom will join Ensighten. The acquisition adds an analytical backbone to what Ensighten calls its “Agile Marketing Platform.”

“We had already been able to collect and do some [analytical] reporting, but I wouldn’t have confidently said it was a next-generation platform prior,” Manion admitted.

Anametrix, according to CEO Pelin Thorogood, will enhance Ensighten’s tag data with insights around pricing and real-time trending topics, as well as offline data like call center logs.

Describing a use case for Anametrix, Thorogood said a number of automotive and retail brands use the platform to optimize marketing campaigns based on varying degrees of brand loyalty.

“Regardless of how much money was spent within a certain variant, we’re able to [see via] advanced analytics that it was really the number of orders the consumer made that was driving loyalty,” she said. “We defined loyalty by product segment and amount of money spent.” Anametrix also factored in such variants as season, product category and competitive intelligence.

Ensighten’s building its own version of a marketing stack. Most recently, the company acquired TagMan, which added attribution marketing, but the core of Ensighten’s offering is “Ensighten Activate,” its data-management platform, and “Ensighten Privacy,” a privacy management application independent from Ensighten’s TMS.

“Tag management is really about owning the customer relationship and driving a one-to-one interaction, rather than just getting a pixel to fire somewhere on your site,” Manion said. “One of the things we’re looking at is, as you create an offer and you want to deploy that consistently across your website, mobile apps, etc., ‘How do I do that in a way that doesn’t involve me going to 15 different [data] sources?’”

“We’re looking at that,” was Manion’s response when asked if Ensighten will make a bid for campaign execution, as Adobe did with Neolane. “I can’t say whether we will partner or buy in that area,” he said, but he noted that “when you have manual steps in a [marketing automation] process, that’s when you wind up with disjointed” data outputs.

DMP’s (generally) power ad networks and the ad ecosystem with third-party data.
Ensighten's Activate product delivers individual data across digital channels in real–time to existing DMP’s improving content and ad relevance. If you are a DMP working within our platform, you should reach out to us and ask us how this works to enhance your stickiness.

The Activate product allows our enterprise clients to collect & own (so they can then act) on their own first party data. Our client, Symantec discusses this in a clip here on stage: http://po.st/Activation

That means, if you want to test one DMP against another, or port your data from a Bluekai to a Turn, Krux or other - you can do so. We help clients keep a carbon copy of the 1st party data that they are constantly enriching and we do NOT want to be a DMP.

Combined with the TMS aspect, this enables us to to deliver clients like United Airlines, Sony, US Bank etc, a truly personalized customer experience based on the complete view of the individual customer journey: EG, knowing what real-time action to take based on immediate intent

To further explain, it's best to take from the adexchanger article that your own Ryan Joe covered in more detail (link below text).

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Let me phrase this carefully so I don’t tread on anybody’s toes. We have the capabilities and the technology to act as a DMP. But because we’re a data consolidator, we can also grab data from outside DMPs and merge them within our customers’ portfolios. Do we want to become the next BlueKai? No, that’s not the way we’ll go. But we could do that.

How does your philosophy differ from a company like BlueKai?
The biggest difference is we are the data and technology arm of our customers. We want to make it easy for our customers to manage the technologies they want to deploy. The difference is BlueKai and others like it were more of a data aggregator. They enriched and resold the data. We’re more customer-centric, working for our enterprise customers, rather than being a cookie jar for the Internet, where you could buy the lollipops you like.